It is known in the art of commercial photographic processing to maintain very high rates of processing in order to operate profitably. Recent developments in photographic systems include the combination of silver halide and magnetic technologies. New film formats have a magnetic strip containing magnetic information that must be processed on compatible equipment. U.S. Pat. No. 5,229,810 illustrates a photographic sensitive film coated with an optically transparent magnetic layer whereby information can be magnetically written or read therefrom. These new type films also include additional optical information such as bar coded film ID numbers and claim numbers, and print aspect ratio and cartridge hand of load, known as "fat" bits. New and conventional photographic processing equipment must be able to read and interpret this information so that photographic, as well as index prints, can be generated. An example of a photofinishing apparatus capable of reading such information is disclosed in pending U.S. Ser. No. 08/394,533, filed Feb. 17, 1995, entitled FILM PREPARATION WORKSTATION, by Bradley C. DeCook and Thomas J. Murray. This application is hereby incorporated by reference into this application in its entirety. The film preparation workstation is designed to receive film for reading data therefrom and/or writing various data thereon and taking the data and supplying it to additional photofinishing devices, either by floppy disk or via Internet connection. It is also desirable to write information that has been read directly on the film. However, a problem with prior art devices is that there is required computational time from the moment information is read so that it can be translated to a format whereby allowing the data to be written on the magnetic layer present on the film. It is also desirable that this information be placed at a particular location on this film and accomplished at a high rate of speed.
Applicants have invented an improved system whereby information that has been read can be written onto the film in a precise, controlled, and synchronized manner by utilizing an event tracking system.
Writing the information directly on the film avoids or minimize the necessity of having floppy disks or Internet connection. Additionally, the information once printed on the film will always be available with the image thereon, thereby avoiding the need to have banks of memory in order to obtain all of the information scanned from the film.